


Chaotic

by Vee



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Angst, M/M, POV Second Person
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-08-08
Updated: 2013-08-08
Packaged: 2017-12-22 19:17:05
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,201
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/917030
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vee/pseuds/Vee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>You’re nine lives walking on two wires, and you’ve cheated more things than death. So you cannot die. That was a conclusion and then it was an order.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Chaotic

He came to the conclusion that you cannot die. You’re nine lives walking on two wires, and you’ve cheated more things than death. So you cannot die. That was a conclusion and then it was an order. You’re an angel of death; his angel of death, because he needs that. Your uncaring façade is like a shroud some nights, a shameful mirror that doesn’t reflect emotion the way humans are supposed to reflect emotion. Your eyes won’t hold tears, you said before. It’s the worst sort of half-truth because you know he takes it to mean that you don’t admire those who actually have the capacity to weep for the dead, the compassion to cry for the living.

You’re still awake thinking, not philosophizing but strategizing, and you don’t think in any position but upright. You’re in his room because that’s just where you are. There’s not a noise in the room, not a noise in the whole dark eternity of the night, but he stirs and you hear a sharp breath hitch in his throat. Terror sounds so human, coming from him, coming from an unconscious place as it always does in the dead of the night that’s never exactly as safe as a calculating mind wants it to be. You reach over and don’t really think about it, you just touch him, lay your palm flat, rub there where you know it’s scarred beneath the fabric until the strange balm of closeness makes him sleep calmly again.

You don’t remember the first time you saw those scars; not by date or reference. Years blend together and only _events_ stand out, so that’s what it remains to you: an event, a memory of a momentous thing being the first time you accompanied Erwin Smith to the inner walls. You learned that bureaucracy is shit, you learned that rule by the privileged only worked because of order by the strongest. You learned that he drinks, and drinks heavily, but drinks so very rarely that it’s something most people he knows would go a too-short lifetime without learning. You split a bottle of strong liquor with him in the officers’ quarters at the military court and claimed you felt nothing. He said he needed to get out of his uniform, now that the sun was down. He didn’t make you leave the room. You crossed a leg curiously, tentatively, and the chair creaked beneath you. You watched him.  

He never made you leave the room, and your eyes made a careful catalog of memories from the scars revealed. The usual strap welts cut deep in certain spots, testament to maneuvers gone awry, but there were some that read like macabre storybooks. Flowered hands of scar tissue here and deep curving hooks of long-pinked flesh there.

“That’s from a shotgun,” you noted, getting to your feet to dispose of the empty bottle, pointing at the starburst on his chest. It was the most aesthetically striking at the time, and it remains your favorite.

“Someone didn’t trust me,” he explained it simply, putting callused fingertips to the gruesome pattern with an almost loving touch.

You threw away the bottle; it made a hollow crash at the bottom of the bin, but didn’t shatter. “I trust you.”

“I know you do.”

That was never a question, somehow, not even from the first moment you met.

You’re tactless and brutish, and though in public he likes to take the words out of your mouth and rephrase them (you never asked for the favor), he mirrors you in private. There are highs and there are lows; neither of you are men at rest. For highs and lows alike there are curses and there are thrown accusations – often at each other, because strategy is only debated by the survivors. When tensions ebb they ebb in tandem, and then his hands are on your shoulders and he’s kissing you from behind, because this is the ritual, this is the release. Even victories are mass graves on his conscience, and his conscience is made physical manifest for you to bear. That’s what you are.

Edifice and foundation. He presents and you bear what he hides. This is the way it must work. He orders you to not die, an uncharacteristically tender kiss on your pulse landing after he says it. “That’s the easy part.” You’re trying to be romantic, trying to be poetic and profound. You want to say something about earning the right to live, for all the blood you have to pay back. He’s pushing your knees apart, though, and it would kill the mood.

In the desperate oblivion of darkness outside the walls, where his nightmares are worst and he only sleeps because of necessity, you fuck like animals, spending your energy and hating yourselves for It, swearing into each other’s ears with gasping assurances that it will kill you, this will be the death of legions. Because somehow fear translates to need, and need translates to your hands tearing into his clothes because everyone is dying and he’s not sure he’s alive anymore, and you’re not sure you’re even human anymore. When everything is hell only the rawest, most shameful and exhausting pleasure can bring back the humanity you promised to die for.

You don’t die the next day for tempting fate, though. And the next day. And the next.

Humans live to die, you tell him when you’re inside the walls again. “They live to do what they can in that time, and that’s that.” It’s not romantic or poetic or profound, but that’s not your area.

“So we’re going to die.” He’s getting profound, you can tell by the look on his face. That’s his area only occasionally, and when it is you manage to reach past the dismal pointlessness of other people and be almost shockingly attracted to him. “So we can protect other humans long enough for them to die.”

“Long enough for them to give birth to other humans, so those humans can die.”

It’s not funny. It’s really not funny, but you both laugh, and can’t stop laughing. Highs and lows, and these are the highs. Hysterical at the futility of existence you fall into one another with just enough liquor in your blood that it doesn’t temper the sex drive. Bodies roll together in a long, comfortable, _safe_ window of opportunity. When he fucks you the bedframe clatters hard against the wall, and the wall is connected to the hallway, and you come harder because you know he doesn’t care. You know he wants people to hear you, but more importantly to hear him and know his territory. Humans live to do what they can in the time they have, and in the time he has (he assures you while you’re still a sticky, shuddering, useless mess of barely a body) he wants you, and he wants people to know. He forces the hand away from your face and holds your mouth open, meets your dark glare and makes you yell and sob for him because he _can._   

The thing about desiring him is that it can only be for moments at a time in any given situation. The sensation is actually dull to you, because desire is not a palatable thing, not unless satisfaction has already presented itself as imminent. With death the more imminent possibility, desire is rotten. He is not a challenge, he is not a conquest. You were once that for him, back when he used to call you a little beast and defeated you handily, time and again. You got the feeling over time and then again that he didn’t want to win, when he sparred with you. That was the motivation you needed. The opportunity presented itself; his weakness presented itself. You took it, you beat him, you got better, you stayed neck and neck. Just stay strong, was the first directive. Get stronger, was the next. Don’t die, was the final, and that is where you remain. Daunting, to excel at a game that you must eventually lose. Unless you really are an angel. Unless he really is already a ghost.

 But the thing about desiring him is also that it opens portholes in your reality, little glimpses back to memories that _make_ desire into a thing that tastes good in your mouth. The memory ties to the expectation of the present, and when you see him riding, for maybe a split-second without even meaning to, you’ll remember how he asked you to stay with him, the same night you saw his scars for the first time, shortly after you’d beaten him, seemingly long before he told you to never die.

You thought he was drunk, but then you realized he wasn’t _that_ drunk, and you deferred to protocol and said you’d help him to bed. He caught you and held you, and the movement was like sparring but just slightly different, like the mother tongue of violence. Not one for mincing words, he held your face and said, “I want you,” looked down at you because you weren’t about to rise up and he wasn’t about to stoop down.

Horizontally, though; that wasn’t a concern horizontally.

Strange, almost-unfamiliar heat ran through you, and you weren’t used to it but you weren’t about to fight it. Had you ever been touched, had you ever touched someone else? Not in any pertinent way. Not in any way that stuck. Adolescent games, all of what had come before. You’d never felt a strong man’s hand on the small of your naked back, you’d never wound your fingers around a proud, magnificent erection, you’d never followed that with your mouth. You’d never been penetrated.

He told you to relax only once, but he caught the look you gave and knew that wasn’t an option, not for a soldier, not ever. He went slow, cherished the security of the walls around you and made you his lover. Haltingly, at first. Sometimes awkwardly. It had been some time, since he’d last indulged himself. You weren’t the best one to refresh him, maybe, because it’s years later and he’s laughing about how cold you were, how stiff you were. You make it into a boorish joke, say he wishes your ass was always so tight, and he turns it back into a flirtation, grabbing you and kissing your neck roughly and saying it always is.  

You’ve both had practice enough, and infrequent though it’s been you remember your own bodies and the cues they give one another well enough to slip into patterns of muscle memory, comfortable assurances of the most human pleasure you can possibly rend and provide.    

The aftermath is disgusting to you. You’re fairly certain he has no clue what he does to your body, though you’ve practically declared it to the heavens in the last lurid details you had left while begging him to fuck you harder. He offers to clean up after. You tell him to leave the mess for the pigs in the military police to find once you’ve left their precious stronghold. That’s a new level for you.

You have your scars, too, your own spots where the straps dug too deep against dry skin or where trees mangled yielding flesh. A titan once had you by the leg until you cut yourself free, and there’s a bloom of discoloration still on the spot where the bruise was sickly blue and green for months. That’s the leg he holds up to open the pathway for himself, kissing your knee as he looks down at the juncture between your bodies and pushes inside, and in some other reality you would think of him as a prize. But this is a warped reality of moments and lifetimes and sweaty nights snatched from death’s mouth itself, so there’s no time for you to feel anything but foolish for finding pride in the fact that Erwin Smith is almost devastatingly handsome. You’re still runty and beady-eyed with a waist too waspish for your frame, but he still finds opportunities to call you _beautiful,_ to call you _sexy._

That’s not the important part. Erwin Smith has nightmares, because he works a till with the currency of human life. He can’t sleep when he needs to, so you put a hand on him or nudge your back against his, and suddenly everything’s okay for a split-second. You face him. Your arms curl around him. You are a human utility, but somehow that’s elevated to something less simple when he murmurs “I love you” in a moment of (not) weakness (but strength). You say it back. If there’s one thing it all boils down to, it’s love, and even if a simple assemblage of words wouldn’t tell you, even if it weren’t for the way his eyes search you out before he accounts for the rest of the squad, even if you didn’t feel uneasily uplifted every single time his orgasm spills deep inside your body…  

“Remember your orders,” he says as you ride toward the rising sun. Of course you won’t forget them. At least there’s something to stay alive for, even as an angel of death.

 

   


End file.
